Broadband Blog

Broadband deals – where to start? I guess price is probably the best place! Broadband prices have come down significantly in recently years and the market is still competitive enough to keep prices down. However, because most broadband suppliers are still trying to compete based on price, their marketing departments have been working overtime to try to convince consumers that they each offer the best price. Headline prices claiming broadband for less than a fiver a month are splashed across billboards and newspapers, but be warned, they don’t tell the full story!

A large number of broadband suppliers, including BT, Virgin Media and Tiscali to name a few, offer great looking prices that only actually last a few months. You are then left with a much bigger bill for the rest of your contract. Other tactics are to offer competitive monthly rates but hit you with setup costs such as activation fees and modems.

The other factor that makes comparing broadband prices difficult is phone line rental. Some suppliers can only deliver broadband down a BT line, so you need to pay BT line rental (£10.50 a month) on top of the broadband bill. Other suppliers require a BT phone line but then charge you line rental themselves rather than through BT. Some broadband deals now include line rental fees, and Virgin Media cable broadband can be bought as a stand alone broadband product with no need for a phone line or line rental. The latest development in the broadband market is mobile broadband which is delivered directly to your computer via a “dongle”, so there is no line rental required.

These different pricing methods make it very difficult to compare broadband deals and pretty tricky to work out how much broadband will actually cost you. E4S has developed a formula for cutting through the marketing spiel to reveal the true cost of each broadband deal and enable you to compare them at a glance. Some sites show you the total contract cost of each broadband deal, but this can be misleading because different broadband deals have different contract lengths, so you are not comparing like with like. E4S has therefore calculated the “effective price” per month of each broadband deal. This factors in all setup costs, discounts, marketing gimmicks etc over the whole broadband contract to show you how much each deal effectively costs per month (Note: This is not the monthly bill you will receive because some deals offer cheap rates for the first few months and then higher rates afterwards). This means that you can see at a glance which deals are actually the cheapest. (Compare broadband deals here)

There is, of course, far more to a broadband deal than the price alone. You should consider speed, download limit and contract length before buying. The E4S broadband comparison chart allows you to compare all those factors as well as the effective price per month (you can even sort the columns depending on which factor is most important to you).  You may also have preferences about whether virus protection, email addresses, wireless routers, online storage and the like are included. Customer service is also worth considering, but that is a story for another day!

Good luck comparing broadband deals, and I hope the E4S effective price per month figure helps you see through the marketing gimmicks!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can leave a response.